Can Dad be in the book too? A Father's Day story about the two of them

It started over a week in July and then it just kept going. Our daughter wants to go up on her dad's shoulders, jump off, go straight back up. She is two, so there is no half-doing it, and weeks later she is still asking.

He loves it more than she does. So on 24 July we made a book out of it, and we put her dad in the book too: you add a second photo, of the parent, and the two of them are drawn together through the story. Anyone ordering an Almia book can do that.

We did it because a photo was not going to be enough. We could take a hundred pictures of the shoulders and still have a hundred versions of the same still moment. What he will want in ten years is the day around it, in order, with a beginning and an end, so he can sit down with her when she is old enough and read back something the two of them used to do. That is the thing a book does that a camera roll cannot, and it is most of why these make such a good present between a father and a daughter.

Can a parent be in a personalised children's book?

Yes. You upload your child's photo, and once their character is approved you add a second photo, of the parent. Both of them are then drawn through the story, keeping the same face from the first scene to the last.

Holding the face is the whole trick. Any book can drop a dad's name into a sentence, and plenty do. But a two-year-old is not reading the sentence. She is looking at the picture, and if the man in it stops looking like her dad somewhere around page nine, she stops believing the book. It works the same way for him as it does for her, and we walked through how a photo becomes a character in the piece on making a book from your child's photo. The same thing lets a new baby join an older child's story, which we covered in the piece on getting a toddler ready for a sibling. Pointing it at a grown-up gave us something else.

What changes when the book is about your child and someone they love?

A book with two people in it becomes about the relationship rather than about the child. The story turns into what the two of them do together, which makes for a quieter book and usually a warmer one at bedtime.

Most of her books have her on her own as the hero, and there is nothing wrong with that. Being the main character is where the pull comes from in the first place. She sees herself, she keeps coming back.

But look at what this one ended up being. Nine scenes, and hardly anything happens in any of them. She wakes up to him humming in the kitchen and runs down the hallway. He lifts her up, and from that height the kitchen is a different room: the tops of the cupboards, the high shelf where the biscuit tin lives. They go out to the back garden where the sunflowers are. A ginger cat sits and watches them. They walk a street under a flowering jacaranda, past a bakery, past a dog waiting on a lead, and she reaches up into the purple.

Then they climb a big tree and sit in the branches for a while with a playground and a pond down below. She jumps off a branch with her arms out and he catches her. They find ducklings at the edge of the pond. They cross a wooden bridge with a dragonfly over it. It ends with the two of them on the grass in the late light, her curled into him, and then sitting by the pond watching the ducklings go past.

Every book carries a theme, and hers usually reach for something: being adventurous, learning something new, having fun with her friends. The theme on this one was having fun with her dad, and that was the whole of it. No behaviour we were working on at home, nothing to land by the last page. Once we read it we stopped wanting to add anything else to it.

What is a good Father's Day gift from a toddler?

A picture book about a dad and his child is one of the few Father's Day presents that is genuinely from the child and still gets used afterwards. He opens it on the Sunday morning, reads it back to them that night, and it keeps for years after that.

We are hardly neutral here. But most of what a toddler gives on Father's Day was really bought by the other parent, and it ends up on a desk. This one gets opened again, and it holds up over time in a way a mug or a framed photo does not, because it is a story he can tell rather than an image he can look at. There is a fair bit of research behind the reading part, too. A review of forty papers on father involvement found a direct, positive and relatively strong link with children's cognitive development, and cited work showing fathers make unique and direct contributions to their children's literacy through their own reading and writing with them.¹ A randomised trial that ran 126 fathers of preschoolers through an eight-week shared-reading and parenting programme measured moderate gains in their children's language comprehension and expression against a control group.² The American Academy of Pediatrics puts it the other way around: reading together builds the child's brain and the bond with the adult reading to them at the same time.³

When should I order a personalised book for Father's Day?

Australian Father's Day is Sunday 6 September 2026. Books arrive in 7 to 10 business days in Australia and 10 to 14 in New Zealand, tracked, which puts the order-by date at Monday 24 August for Australia and Tuesday 18 August for New Zealand.

Those are the last safe days, not the comfortable ones. Order in the first half of August and it is out of your head. We would rather it sat wrapped in a cupboard for two weeks than turned up on the Monday after.

You do not have to commit before you see it, either. You read the whole book, your child in it, free, before you pay anything. That matters a bit more on this kind of book. You are looking at two faces instead of one, and you should get to sit with every page and decide whether that is really him.

What do you need to make a personalised book about a child and their dad?

Two clear photos, one of your child and one of Dad, and one honest answer about something the two of them actually do together. Your child's photo goes in at the start; Dad's is added a step later, once you have approved how your child looks.

That last one is where people go big when they should go small. Asked what the book should be about, most of us reach for a holiday, or the trip to the coast. A two-year-old does not remember the trip to the coast. Ours was about shoulders. Not an event at all, and it made a better book than a holiday would have, because it is the thing she asks for every single day.

So the question we would ask is not what your child is into. It is what she asks him for, over and over, that he is a bit sick of by now. That is usually the thing he will want back in ten years, and it is rarely the thing anyone thinks to photograph properly. If you want to see what happens between an answer like that and a finished story, we went through how a fully-custom story gets written step by step.

Three things we learned making ours:

• Use a photo where his face is clear and unobstructed. We picked one with his glasses on, since that is what he looks like, and they carry all the way through.
• The everyday version beats the special-occasion version. Shoulders in the hallway did more work than shoulders at a festival would have.
• You do not need a big idea to fill a book like this. An ordinary afternoon carried ours easily. If you are not sure what lands at your child's age, what age these books start working covers it properly.

A note on how we make them

We are Almia. Ellen and I make these books, and every one is built from scratch around the child it is for, which is the only way a book like this one could exist. Nobody has a stock story about a girl and her dad and a jacaranda street and a biscuit tin on a high shelf. Hers was built for her in July, and it does not work for anyone else, which is rather the point.

The shoulders will stop at some point. Kids get heavy, and they get busy, and one day it is a thing she used to ask for rather than a thing she asks for. He will still have the book, and so will she. That is what we would say to any dad weighing this up. The present is not really about Sunday morning. It is a way of getting the thing written down while the two of you are still in the middle of it.

The plain specifics: hardcover, 26 pages, 170gsm silk paper, matte-laminated cover, from A$59.95 plus delivery. Dispatched in 5 to 7 business days, tracked. We currently deliver to Australia and New Zealand, with global delivery on the way. And you read the whole book, your child in it, free, before you pay anything.

Ellen & Diego, Founders of Almia